Question: Our home has a door that goes from the kitchen into the garage and it looks pretty bad from years of being pawed at by our dogs. The time has come to replace it.
A friend of ours is a retired contractor and he says that the new door needs to be a fire door because it goes out to the garage.
Can you tell us what a fire door is and where do we get one?
Your Handyman: Your retired contractor friend has given you correct information.
Building code requires that a door that connects a living space inside your home to a garage must be a fire-rated door. A fire-rated door will bear a metal tag on the edge that identifies it as being fire rated.
The reason is that your garage has a possibility of fire due to cars, motorcycles, lawnmowers and other gasoline-burning and electric machines being stored inside.
A fire-rated door is usually filled with fire-resistant material like gypsum, is very heavy, and is designed so that both the door and the door jamb would be very slow to burn through in the event that a fire started in the garage, allowing you time to safely exit the house and call 9-1-1.
Building code also requires that the fire door have an automatic closing mechanism so it is not accidentally left standing open in the event of a fire. Residential fire doors usually will have self-closing, adjustable tension hinges.
Additional fire protection from a garage fire is also provided by building codes that require that the drywall on the wall that is common to the house and the garage is ⅝-inch thickness, not the more common half-inch thickness drywall found in the rest of your house,.
The drywall also must extend to the roof line in the garage interior to inhibit a garage fire from spreading into the attic space.
It is also a good idea to install a smoke alarm in the garage to provide early warning if a fire occurs.
Both your old door and jamb will need to be removed, and a new pre-hung fire door can be ordered at most any lumber yard or building supply store. It will consist of the door already attached to the jamb with hinges and one of the hinges will have the self-closing feature.
Fire doors can be ordered in different styles and with different veneers to match your kitchen interior, and a carpenter can easily remove your old door and install the new fire-rated door.
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Question: Our shower has been dripping for months and, just recently, the dripping has gotten much worse.
My husband put new washers on the valves, which stopped the dripping for a week or so, but it gradually started back in again.
The shower plumbing is original to the house, which was built in 1964.
Is there any way to stop the dripping or do we need hire a plumber to rip open the walls and put in new handles?
Your Handyman: Whenever you are troubleshooting a problem, it just about always makes sense to try the inexpensive and quick solutions first, which your husband wisely did by installing new washers.
Often a dripping faucet can be easily fixed by unscrewing the part of the valve that is turned by the handle, called the valve cartridge, and replacing or flipping over the little round washer that is compressed against the valve seat to stop the water flow when the handle is in the closed position.
IPlumbing that is quite old may require that the valves be rebuilt, or in the worst case completely replaced.
Rebuilding the hot and cold shower valves involves removing the valve handles and then unscrewing the valve cartridge, which is the long narrow assembly that has the handle attached on the outer end and the rubber washer on the inside end.
Once the cartridge is removed, you will be able to see inside the valve body, which is the brass housing that is fastened inside the wall. You should be able to see the condition of the valve seat, which is the surface that the washer makes contact with.
The valve seat is usually designed in such a way that it, too, can be unscrewed and removed, often requiring a specialized plumbing tool.
Take the old cartridge and valve seat to a plumbing store where replacements should be available.
Lubricate the new parts with a little plumbing or silicone grease, and your valves should work like new when everything is back in place.
Often after many years of exposure to the very hard water of Santa Barbara, it is not unusual to have plumbing valves become so corroded or damaged by mineral scale that they can not be disassembled, or they break apart when under the stress of the plumber’s wrench.
If the years of use and hard water have left your valves in this condition, your only option is the last resort of opening up the wall and installing new valves.
Opening the wall sounds bad and it can be sort of bad, but if the wall behind your shower valves is in a closet or the partition wall to the commode, then it is as simple as removing a little drywall and the valves can be replaced without any damage to the tile in the shower enclosure.
If the backside wall is a tiled wall in another bathroom, a wall with built-in cabinets or the exterior wall of the house on the second story, then your job will probably require breaking away tile and then retiling the wall after the plumber’s job is complete.
Matching the existing tiles is always the trick to an acceptable tile patch when you are forced to retile a small section of a wall, floor or countertop — and it just about always pays off to tuck extra tiles away in the garage or attic when you have any new tile work done.
